Learn how Atlassian uses personas to scale agile development across our tools.

1. Never Lose Sight of the
Customer

2. Dan Radigan
Atlassian!
@danradigan

3. Why?

4. CREATE

5. CREATE VALUE

6. CREATE VALUE
TEST

7. CREATE VALUE
TEST

9. Defining Personas

10. Personas are fictitious, specific, concrete
representations of target users.
- The Essential Persona Lifecycle, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
”
“

11. Personas will:
• Improve products with targeted love for specific customers!
• Increase the overall customer focus of the company!
• Reduce team silos who work with the same customer profile!
• Remain focused on actual customer needs and reduce internal
politics!
• Increase our ability to empathize with our customers!
• Make it easier to resolve issues

12. • Static documents!
• Used in isolation!
• A bunch of stats!
• A replacement for user testing
What personas are not

13. The Software Team

15. Operate
Support!
&!
Operations
Sell
Marketing
Make
Engineering
Product Management
Design

16. Validating a Persona

17. Hmm

18. • Demographics!
• Motivations!
• Concerns!
• Competitive Landscape!
• Adoption process!
• Purchasing Role
Questions to ponder

19. Alex the Attendee

20. Contextual Inquiry
Customer!
Interview
…
EmailSurvey
Social!
Networking

21. 20 to 30

23. Communicating
Outward

29. • Feature based personas!
• Having one person do all the work!
• Adding in your own bias!
• Making them too easy!
• Making assumptions without validating!
• Selectively looking at the persona
Persona Pitfalls

30. Atlassian’s Journey

31. Work CodeIdeas
Code management
and quality
Issue and
project tracking
Content collaboration
and sharing

32. Ideas
WorkCode
Customer
Experience

33. Alana the Aware
1000 people know her

34. Work CodeIdeas
Alana the Aware

35. Customer
Experience
Work Work

36. + TIME

39. What’s in it for me?

40. • Drives the creation of user stories!
• Brainstorm features!
• Prioritize features!
• Key metrics for clear definition of success
Product Owners

41. • Personas drive design decisions. it’s about the
customer.!
• Clearly communicate empathy!
• Better user trials!
Product Designers

42. • Involve development in creating personas.!
• Shared customer empathy!
• Simplified data set!
• Code is tighter with experience
Product Dev

43. "The personas are not useful, it's the
process and the tools that you use with
the personas, that's important.
I only understood the personas once I used
them in empathy maps and user journeys.
Up until then, they were just signs that I
had read."
-An Atlassian Engineer”
“

44. • Customer Targeting!
• Tighter value proposition with product!
• Demo content!
• Consistent language
Product Marketing

45. • No one is better to call your bluff…!
• Support is the gut check on your personas. They don’t
shape them.
Product Support

46. Personas in Action

49. Ideal
Iteration MVP

50. Completing the
Language

55. In review - personas will:
• Improve products with targeted love for specific customers!
• Increase the overall customer focus of the company!
• Reduce team silos who work with the same customer profile!
• Remain focused on actual customer needs and reduce internal
politics!
• Increase our ability to empathize with our customers!
• Make it easier to resolve issues

56. As Alana, I’d like
to be able to track
work by user
persona because I
want follow whose
experience we’re
making better by day.
8

57. Questions?
Slides: TBD URL
Learn more: https://design.atlassian.com/